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More generally, any textual file format where whitespace is significant at the end of a line is calling for trouble.


Maybe. But expecting people to remember a ; (or similar) at the end of lines is going to cause more frequent problems from a UX performance.

So you’re better off accepting the edge cases problems that white space introduces considering the benefits outweighs the pain.


That’s not what I meant. It’s okay for the line break itself to be significant. But whitespace immediately preceding the line break shouldn’t be significant, due to its general invisibility.


Is CR considered whitespace? I always thought that was classed as a non-printable control character. But maybe I’m wrong?

Or are you talking about SP preceding CR and/or LF?


Line breaks are considered whitespace, hence CR is considered whitespace. It is also a control character. This is similar to TAB, or indeed LF.

See here for example: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/byte/isspace

Or here for Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Unicode


Ahh that makes sense then.

Thanks for the responses




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